Yet another pre-purchase Q's thread

[nogi]

Thinking of getting the Thecus N5200B PRO to use with Samsung "SpinPoint" 1TB HD103UJ - 32MB Cache, 1,000GB SATA II HDDs. I have a few questions:

• Had a look in the www.thecus.com/download/other/N5200HDDCompatibilityReport-960712.pdf file and could not see the drive as it's fairly new. Anyone know if the drive will work?
  
• What is RAID Level Migration?
  
• What is RAID Expansion?
  

cheers,
Nogi

[escimo]

Hi Nogi,

RAID Level Migration is the process of upgrading the current RAID level to a newer one, which includes all user data.
For example:
RAID 1 -> RAID 5
RAID 10 -> RAID 5
RAID 5 -> RAID 6.

RAID Expansion is the process of extending the storage capacity of the RAID, which is in use, by exchanging the old smaller hard disk by a new hard disk an rebuild the RAID. After all new hard disks are plugged into the system and the RAID is rebuilt, you can adjust the capacity to the size of the new hard disks by a user function (command).


Incredible...my English is so poor.

I hope you could follow my muss.

regards
escimo

[haloswin2002]

What about increasing storage... going from 5 500GB drives, to 5 1TB drives down the line. Is there any support for that that is built in?

[mcp]

haloswin2002,

I think that's what escimo was referring to in the explaination of RAID Expansion.

I think that basically you would replace one drive at a time with the larger drive. After you replace each drive, you would need to repair/rebuild the array to propagate the data onto the new drive.

Once all 5 drives have been replaced ad populated, you should be able to expand the RAID size to use the full size of the drives.

[nogi]

Thanks guys, that's what I was hoping it was. It must take a long time to go through each disk rebuilding when increasing size though. Probably quicker to move HDDs off to a temp linux box and copy accross to a newly created array?

[haloswin2002]

mcp said:

haloswin2002,

I think that's what escimo was referring to in the explaination of RAID Expansion.

I think that basically you would replace one drive at a time with the larger drive. After you replace each drive, you would need to repair/rebuild the array to propagate the data onto the new drive.

Once all 5 drives have been replaced ad populated, you should be able to expand the RAID size to use the full size of the drives.

Thanks, thats what I was hoping I am just new to this so I wanted the specific question answered. One last concern, I couldnt find any reference to a warranty. I was going to buy a used N5200, but am a little concerned about a failure. Is the OS protected at all? I am assuming there isnt another HDD in there, that it is running off of something else. Should I have to worry about the underlying OS getting corrupted?